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COMMENTARY
September 22, 2001
China & the Taliban
As "showtime" approaches in Afghanistan and possibly elsewhere in Central Asia the Bush administration must keep an eye on China. The Beijing regime has a number of interests to protect in the region and has been playing its own complex "Great Game" through the Taliban in Afghanistan and in alliance with Pakistan. To begin to understand the Beijing position we must look at China's direct stake in the region. The vast north-west Chinese territory of Xinjiang is not part of traditional Chinese civilization. Its peoples are mostly Muslim or rather were before massive largely forced Han Chinese immigration began fifty years ago after Mao Zedong's conquest of China. These were predominantly the Uighur people belonging racially culturally linguistically religiously and in every other way within the emporium of Central Asia. The Uighurs are a nation comparable to the Kazakhs Uzbeks Tadjhiks Turkmens Kirghiz -- Turkic peoples with admixtures of Persian. The Uighurs are now reduced to just under half the population within their own "autonomous region" owing to massive additional transfers of Han Chinese "farmer-immigrants" displaced by the lake filling behind China's vast Three Gorges Dam. To China Xinjiang is like Tibet or Mongolia a foreign "barbarian" nation that has often presented a threat to the frontier and which has been subjugated whenever practicable through two millenia of history. Each of these nations has been so often annexed into a Chinese empire that the Chinese people themselves have come to think they own them. Of the three only "Outer" Mongolia succeeded in staying out of Chinese possession in the 20th century and then only by falling prey to Soviet Russia. One of the great myths about modern Communist China is that it has no territorial or imperial ambitions. It has them but does not admit they are imperial in the Western sense. This modern China still aspires to rule directly over all her immediate neighbours including Korea and to exact "tribute" from the countries beyond them. It aspires to be a superpower on a level with the United States and has not hesitated to link itself with revolutionary movements even in Africa and Latin America. The Chinese attitude towards radical "Islamism" is two-faced. Beijing is happy to train and send armed insurgents -- separatist terrorists -- to infiltrate the Philippines and Indonesia and to sow mischief wherever it can against Western interests. But it is also worried sometimes to the point of paranoia about the security threat to its own frontier territory. Over the past several months both for domestic motives and in anticipation of a blow-up in Central Asia China has been cracking down hard on its Uighur minority. Hundreds possibly thousands have been executed within the so-called Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region under the Chinese domestic "Strike Hard" programme ostensibly aimed at petty criminals but in this case expressly at rooting out Uighur separatists. The whole Uighur ghetto within the city of Beijing was uprooted and demolished on short notice and without compensation to anyone three years ago. (If the 2008 Olympics are ever played our athletes will likely be performing in facilities built over this expropriated site.) There is nothing subtle about the way Beijing responds to domestic security threats including those which like the Falun Gong are largely imaginary. >From the Uighurs they have had very little trouble through the last two decades thanks to their unremitting programme of suppression. While constituting less than half of the regional population the Uighurs supply almost all of the region's victims for Chinese executions and security raids. In the words of an order from a Xinjiang Communist party boss Wang Lequan: "Take as many people as necessary but do not let even a single separatist escape from the net." Oppressed impoverished isolated and demoralized the Uighurs are a people being gradually processed towards extinction in their own ancestral homeland as Xinjiang is progressively Sinified. There are now 400 000 in the Uighur diaspora scattered through Central Asia especially in the Kirghiz. The only serious security threat they have been able to pose has been externally-based. The Uighur diaspora has been in contact is in fact constantly surrounded by Islamist parties and influences operating throughout Central Asia. Of these the Taliban movement trying to export its ideology from Afghanistan is only one but one which has been on the ascendant in power and prestige thanks largely to both official and unofficial sponsorship from Pakistan and large sums emanating from private patrons in Saudi Arabia. Uighur insurgents have on several occasions over the last few years managed to re-enter Xinjiang and mount ambushes on Chinese police and army posts. But China's border defences are such that these were mere skirmishes. Uighur terrorists have caused far more trouble within the Kirghiz and elsewhere in the chaotic post-Soviet environment. >From the Beijing point of view co-operation with the Taliban kills two birds with one stone. On the one hand China has been helping to nurture a very painful thorn in the West's backside; on the other it is buying off Taliban encouragment for Uighur separatists. Until Sept. 11 it appeared Beijing's prospects in Kabul were win-win. By co-incidence or otherwise on Sept. 10 the day before the organized terror assault on New York and Washington Chinese representatives in Kabul signed a memorandum of understanding for economic and technical co-operation with Mullah Mohammed Ishaq the Taliban minister for mining. It was the most comprehensive of a series of contractual agreements between Beijing and the Taliban in defiance of the spirit if not the letter of both Western and United Nations sanctions. It confirmed the Chinese role as the Taliban's best friend outside the Islamic world. The most interesting part of the agreement is a promise to build desperately-needed infrastructure for the Taliban regime throughout the nine-tenths of Afghanistan's surface area presently under Taliban control. Already last year two Chinese telecommunications firms Huawei Technologies and ZTE began work laying secure land-based phone lines between and within Kabul and Kandahar and they may well be directly involved in providing communications services to the terrorist "underground" (literally for it works from caves) in the Kandahar region. Huawei is the firm that has been installing communications equipment for Iraq's air defence system. It was named in a protest to the Chinese government by the Bush administration on its first day in office. The aid to Afghanistan is by no means confined to economy and infrastructure. Political contacts between China and the Taliban have been increasing rapidly. Last November a delegation from Beijing's Institute of Contemporary International Relations -- its equivalent of the old Soviet international department -- made extensive visits to Kabul and Kandahar. While there is still no formal Chinese diplomatic mission to Afghanistan China's ambassador to Pakistan has visited Kabul and frequently hosted visiting Taliban delegations in Islamabad. Yet while with one hand China tries to help the Afghan terrorist regime in its struggle against the West with the other it protects the Chinese self-interest by double-dealing. The recently-created Shanghai Co-operative Organization allies China with Russia and three Central Asian nations in the fight against regional cross-border terrorism. This agreement was largely inspired by Taliban successes in exporting terror cells through Central Asia and was designed specifically to co-ordinate action against them. In the present circumstances with American forces now being deployed through Central Asia and British French and American special forces almost certainly already on the ground in the rebel-held Panjashir Valley of the Afghan north-east and exploring elsewhere; with unmanned but rocket-armed U.S. "Predator" helicopters already surveying the Afghan countryside -- the Chinese will be reassessing their position. Companies like Huawei are still at work and indeed may be left cynically and deliberately in place to provide a pretext for a Chinese propaganda storm if they become "collateral damage" during U.S. strikes into Afghanistan. The Beijing regime extracted big concessions when the Americans accidentally hit their embassy in Belgrade during NATO's Kosovo campaign in 1999. It may well be planning to make the most of another such incident in the future. Under international pressure and for fear of a diplomatic backlash that would jeopardize its own large commercial interests the Beijing leadership is outwardly drawing back from its association with the Taliban now. Its special relationship with Pakistan would appear to be at least for the present in tatters for Pakistan's Gen. Pervez Musharraf has felt compelled to commit his country unambiguously to the American side. But this does not mean the Chinese presence in the region will cease to be felt. Its most likely immediate form will be "running interference" diplomatically and otherwise for the Taliban terror regime. China's Security Council veto can prevent the United Nations from providing any additional cover of formal legitimacy to coming U.S. and Western operations. But the Bush administration acted quickly to secure a supportive U.N. proclamation within two days of the terrorist strike against it probably anticipating that it would not be able to get anything better later. Between that and the invocation by its European allies of Article Five of the NATO Charter it already has more or less what it needs to proceed correctly under international law. But there are many other things the Chinese can do to unsettle the allied effort throw up distractions and drive wedges between the U.S. and its allies. The foremost among these must be constantly borne in mind. Communist China now has a record of opportunism going back fifty years and will be alive every moment to the possibilities for pressuring Taiwan as the Americans become over-committed elsewhere. On balance this is kept in check because on balance the Bush administration has succeeded in communicating to the Chinese leadership that the U.S. will defend Taiwan regardless of cost in any foreseeable circumstances. But few of the coming circumstances are in any way foreseeable. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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